We are pleased to announce the release of TICRA Tools 20.1. Besides the many improvements across the products GRASP, ESTEAM, CHAMP 3D and QUPES, TICRA Tools 20.1 marks a major milestone for POS – your tool for advanced payload antenna design.

Take advantage of POS integration in TICRA Tools

Over the years POS has proved to be the industry standard tool for shaping of reflector antennas and optimisation of arrays and array-fed reflectors in the satellite industry.

The integration of POS in TICRA Tools makes it possible for you to perform the entire RF design of payload antenna systems without leaving the TICRA Tools framework. For example, you can include the feeds from CHAMP 3D in your antenna models – and even optimise the feeds for optimum illumination of the reflector at the same time as you optimise the shape of the reflector.

Convert old POS projects to new TICRA Tools projects easily

The integration of POS in TICRA Tools has been designed to allow full backward compatibility with the previous stand-alone POS software versions while at the same time offering a large range of new opportunities made possible by the seamless integration with GRASP, ESTEAM, CHAMP 3D, and QUPES in TICRA Tools.

It is still possible to use the features from POS 6.2.1 in TICRA Tools 20.1. These features are included as Classic POS objects in TICRA Tools and allow you to keep POS running with your current production-line setup.

Conveniently set up optimisation goals across all products in TICRA Tools

It is possible to use all goals in the TICRA Tools optimisation tab with POS. This makes it much more convenient to set up goals – for example, by defining angular regions or using the simple pattern templates available in TICRA Tools.

The well-known stations-files concept to define coverage-area requirements is of course still available, making use of stations files generated by e.g. SATSOFT.

Convenient positioning of new legends

Across all products in TICRA Tools, plot legends and the interface to control these have been updated. The new legends can be placed either inside the plots – and dragged to a position of your choice – or be placed outside. Additionally, the visual enhancement of the legends ensures that your plots can be used in presentations and technical reports directly from TICRA Tools.

New features and enhancements across all TICRA Tools products

Numerous new features and enhancements have been added to all products in TICRA Tools 20.1. To name a few, in GRASP we have added a paraboloidal torus surface suitable for multi-beam ground-station antennas linking to several satellites.

Users of ESTEAM will find it easier to make analysis of Luneberg lenses and other structures using concentric ellipsoidal shapes with the new Ellipsoidal Volume class.

A number of new devices have been added to CHAMP 3D, including waveguide Ts with pins, metallic/dielectric waveguide geometries, and 3 new rotationally symmetric reflectors, also available in GRASP.

QUPES now makes it easier to optimise large structures by using a spline representation of geometrical properties across large surfaces. This is particularly useful when optimising quasi-periodic structures over electrically large surfaces, where the element geometry varies slowly.

With a valid Technical Support and Maintenance (TSM) contract you can download the latest version of TICRA Tools and read the full release note Tools on our support site.